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So, the papers where the activist authors faked entire datasets to back their pretend claims?It would be challenging for any peer reviewer to spot papers that are based on fake datasets, as long as the malicious authors took care to make sure the numbers add up.Unless you argue that journals should only publish articles that agree with the editors views, if it looks like genuine research (as the hoaxers' goal was) and has no other issues, it's likely to be published (and failed to be replicated, like most of published science unfortunately).

md0 wrote:So, the papers where the activist authors faked entire datasets to back their pretend claims?It would be challenging for any peer reviewer to spot papers that are based on fake datasets, as long as the malicious authors took care to make sure the numbers add up.Unless you argue that journals should only publish articles that agree with the editors views, if it looks like genuine research (as the hoaxers' goal was) and has no other issues, it's likely to be published (and failed to be replicated, like most of published science unfortunately).

Abiding by the maxim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" would have sufficed. But I guess ideologues tend to view any claim that supports their ideology as plausible, i.e. not extraordinary.

Crucially, the hoaxers provided the extraordinary evidence in the form of made-up datasets in most of their papers. The peer-review model is vulnerable to this exploit, and not just in social sciences. Non-reproducible papers are published in medicine and in psychology all the time. To make it look like this fundamental problem of science publishing is entirely the fault of leftists (I guess this is what you are getting at), is the ideological spin.

I am sorry it had to happen this way, but may this be the unravelling of the disgusting Golden Visa scheme. One of those "valuable investors" in the second tier of the programme (so, only indefinite residence permit, no citizenship) turned out to have used his 490kEUR investment to set up a human trafficking business.

I'm finding conservatives' obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly-elected representative to Congress from New York City, kind of fascinating. She seems to have replaced even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as their biggest bugaboo. I know she's quite popular among liberals and progressives as well, but honestly no one I know on the left posts about her half as often as the right-wing populists I know.

They seem particularly interested in portraying her as dumb but can't even be bothered to pay enough attention to what she says to do this effectively. I expected to see quotes from her taken out of context and ridiculed but instead mostly what I see are quotes that are completely invented. Maybe because 90% of the things she says about wealth inequality and the flaws of capitalism are things they'd actually agree with?

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

So, on this 9000 square km rock of ours, we finally agreed that maybe it's a good idea to unify the mobile phone networks and electricity grids of north and south. I guess that last one puts us ahead of Serbia and Kosovo.https://cyprus-mail.com/2019/02/26/lead ... ral-works/

linguoboy wrote:They seem particularly interested in portraying her as dumb but can't even be bothered to pay enough attention to what she says to do this effectively. I expected to see quotes from her taken out of context and ridiculed but instead mostly what I see are quotes that are completely invented.

md0 wrote:Crucially, the hoaxers provided the extraordinary evidence in the form of made-up datasets in most of their papers. The peer-review model is vulnerable to this exploit, and not just in social sciences. Non-reproducible papers are published in medicine and in psychology all the time. To make it look like this fundamental problem of science publishing is entirely the fault of leftists (I guess this is what you are getting at), is the ideological spin.

Did you read how the hoax was uncovered? By journalists who simply tried to confirm the author identity and soon discovered that the author didn't even exist. That's how easy it was to deconstruct this "extraordinary evidence".

Jonathan Haidt summed up the incident well:

"The project was undertaken because there is a long running and colossal violation of academic integrity in a few departments in the academy. There is a disciplinary norm in some fields and journals of publishing papers that take a particular moral/political position, whether or not they have scholarly merit. That was Alan Sokal's point in his hoax paper: as long as he seemed to be taking a social constructionist point of view, it didn't matter that the editors could not understand what he had written. The grievance studies hoax shows that this problem persists, across multiple journals in several fields. Boghassian and his colleagues undertook a long, time consuming, and career-risking project to stand up for academic integrity by exposing what is, arguably, an academic subculture that tolerates intellectual fraud."

linguoboy wrote:I'm finding conservatives' obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly-elected representative to Congress from New York City, kind of fascinating. She seems to have replaced even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as their biggest bugaboo. I know she's quite popular among liberals and progressives as well, but honestly no one I know on the left posts about her half as often as the right-wing populists I know.

They seem particularly interested in portraying her as dumb but can't even be bothered to pay enough attention to what she says to do this effectively. I expected to see quotes from her taken out of context and ridiculed but instead mostly what I see are quotes that are completely invented. Maybe because 90% of the things she says about wealth inequality and the flaws of capitalism are things they'd actually agree with?

I was cautiously optimistic about AOC, but the Amazon debacle taught me better.

“If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to” - AOC

There is no 3 billion lying around to invest elsewhere, and it speaks volumes that the most vocal critic of the deal apparently didn't have a clue about the economics of it.

Yasna wrote:“If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to” - AOC

There is no 3 billion lying around to invest elsewhere, and it speaks volumes that the most vocal critic of the deal apparently didn't have a clue about the economics of it.

I think she understands the economics just fine, she's just making a rhetorical point here. Why choose to forego all that future revenue? You don't need to to lure businesses to NYC. Businesses will come to NYC because it's a good place to do business. They should be willing to pay the real cost of that.

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

You don't need to to lure businesses to NYC. Businesses will come to NYC because it's a good place to do business. They should be willing to pay the real cost of that.

Amazon HQ2 is not just another business. It's a massive economic boon, and since America has at least half a dozen attractive potential locations for it, NYC is dispensable. You seem to think that the same economic considerations apply to Amazon HQ2 as would apply to opening a new department store branch.

According to whose estimates? And what's the net after you account for the potential costs?

Yasna wrote:

You don't need to to lure businesses to NYC. Businesses will come to NYC because it's a good place to do business. They should be willing to pay the real cost of that.

Amazon HQ2 is not just another business. It's a massive economic boon, and since America has at least half a dozen attractive potential locations for it, NYC is dispensable.

"Amazon says that it will nonetheless continue to expand its presence in New York City, where 5,000 of its employees already work." (Wired, Feb. 14th 2019)

Hmm, I guess NYC isn't so "dispensable" after all.

Yasna wrote:You seem to think that the same economic considerations apply to Amazon HQ2 as would apply to opening a new department store branch.

What is Amazon but a retailer that we've simply allowed to swell to massive size?

You seem to be taking Amazon 100% at their word when it comes to the benefits of the deal and the good faith with which they approached it. Me, I don't trust Amazon farther than I can shotput the Earth. As it turns out, neither does Prof. Scott Galloway at NYU:

I lease office space all the time for my businesses and I always tell my real estate agent, “We can lease any office in the world as long as I can walk there from where I live.”

That is the exact same instruction that Jeff Bezos gave to this ridiculous con, this ruse. Because if you look at... Amazon is now talking about having three headquarters, Seattle, Crystal City and Long Island City. The Bezos’ also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles, so this was never a contest. It was a con meant to induce ridiculous terms that they then took to the cites all along that they knew they were going to be in.

Also, the whole HQ2 and 3 is also a bit of a con and bad faith. It’s like if you’ve ever been to your kid’s charity school auction and there’s a frenzy for bidding on dinner with the headmaster and someone bids $9,000 and someone bids $10,000 and then they decide right then, well, we’re going to do two dinners. Thank you for the $19,000. Because I would bet, Kara, that when they pick two cities and they went to 2 and 3, they didn’t say, “Well, only half our headquarters is going there, so we’re going to let you cut the tax subsidies and incentives and half.”

This just has ill will written all over it, and I think people started to figure out what was going on. So what did they do? They’re like, “Oh, the con is up. They figured out this wasn’t a contest and we’ve abused the Commonwealth and wasted resources and time of municipal officials. What do we do?” Announce it into the busiest news cycle of the year.

Or is your contention just that it shouldn't be off the back of Amazon?

My contention is simply that AOC doesn't know what she's talking about, despite the best mental gymnastics by her sympathizers to spin her statement into something coherent.

linguoboy wrote:According to whose estimates? And what's the net after you account for the potential costs?

According to the state*. What potential costs? Rising real estate prices would be a boon to some and a bane to others. Having more people in the neighborhood would be appreciated by some and disliked by other. Gentrification is likewise favored by some and disliked by others. So the potential costs are mostly ambiguous, and the benefits in high-paying tech jobs, tax revenue, diversification of NYC away from the finance industry, and auxiliary economic activity are absolutely massive.

"Amazon says that it will nonetheless continue to expand its presence in New York City, where 5,000 of its employees already work." (Wired, Feb. 14th 2019)

Hmm, I guess NYC isn't so "dispensable" after all.

Context. It's dispensable in the context of attracting HQ2, which is of another magnitude.

What is Amazon but a retailer that we've simply allowed to swell to massive size?

I don't even know where to start with this. Google AWS.

You seem to be taking Amazon 100% at their word when it comes to the benefits of the deal and the good faith with which they approached it. Me, I don't trust Amazon farther than I can shotput the Earth. As it turns out, neither does Prof. Scott Galloway at NYU:[...]But, yeah, it's definitely AOC who doesn't understand economics and the behaviour of massive corporations here...

The majority of the tax incentives are tied to Amazon actually delivering on the promised jobs. Nobody is just blindly trusting Amazon. Your marketing professor has been proven dead wrong by the fact that Amazon called off the NYC deal and decided to take its operations elsewhere. Looks like Bezos wasn't dead set on NYC after all.

My Swedish co-worker was recently complaining to me about how she feels that people (including the Nobel Prize committee) are exploiting Greta Thunberg. She said she's a child proposing the kinds of overly simplistic solutions to big problems that children often propose, such as for everyone to just stop using cars. She thinks people are using Greta's childishness for their own agendas and worries about how Greta will feel about that when she gets older.